Looking at the images posted by ABCD567, if e can get traffic on a biscuit tin, where i am going wrong with the antenna outside with clear view and under the flight path.

Most likely your antenna wire broke. Or the dongle could have been damaged by electrostatic discharge as well. Antenna wire seems more likely.
Those antennas are very flimsy.

Or you could have very strong interference / noise in the area (mobile tower / TV broadcast or something like that)

The configuration looks normal for the default fr24 installation. If you wanted to use mutability 1.15 then you didn't quite do it correctly but you should still receive something. (but you would have the old google map which doesn't work properly anmore, it shouldn't be a problem with receiving aircraft thought)

Post the output of this command please:
cat /run/dump1090*/stats.json | grep total